Russian missiles and drones have turned Ukraine’s power grid into a front line, not a backdrop. Transmission lines, substations and thermal plants that once sat in open fields are now deliberate targets, with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warning that the country has already lost about half its generating capacity and that repair crews are working around the clock in brutal winter conditions. Faced with that reality, engineers are racing to sink cables, transformers and even entire plants underground, betting that concrete and earth can do what air defenses alone cannot.
The strategy is more than a civil engineering project. It is an attempt to redesign how Ukraine produces and delivers electricity, blending buried infrastructure with a more decentralized mix of nuclear, renewables and storage that could shorten blackouts and harden the country against future wars. The question is not just whether the work can be finished before the next cold snap, but whether this forced experiment can become a template for energy security in an age of precision strikes.
The grid as a battlefield
For nearly two years, Russia has treated Ukraine’s energy system as a military target, using waves of missiles and drones to hit power plants, substations and high voltage lines. Analysts describe Russia’s air campaign against Ukrainian energy, economic and military industrial targets as highly destructive, with strikes reaching deep into cities including Kyiv. From early October through mid January Ukraine’s intelligence service logged exactly 256 drone and missile strikes on energy infrastructure, according to Holtz, a tally that underscores how systematically the grid is being hunted. Earlier this year, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a nightly address that the situation had “significantly worsened” and that Ukraine had lost about half of its generating capacity, a stark assessment echoed by the national grid operator and reported through President Volodymyr Zelenskiy himself.
The human cost of that strategy is visible in darkened apartment blocks and improvised heating centers. Over the past four years, fossil fuel power plants across Ukraine have suffered hundreds of missile and drone attacks, and small, distributed facilities are increasingly seen as a way to cut the risk that a single hit will plunge an entire region into darkness. The UN’s human rights chief Volker Türk has said he is outraged by renewed overnight attacks that knocked out power and heating in major cities including Kyiv, warning that repeated strikes on energy infrastructure risk compounding human suffering. When Russia once again targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in freezing temperatures, five people were killed and 30 injured, according to footage and accounts from Russia and Ukraine coverage of the attacks.
Burying the backbone
Against that backdrop, Ukraine’s leadership has decided that simply patching up exposed infrastructure is not enough. Authorities have begun moving key parts of the power system underground, from high voltage lines to switching yards, in a bid to make them physically inaccessible to Russian missiles and drones. Reporting from Kyiv describes how Ukraine is relocating critical nodes of its grid below ground to shield them from Russian attacks and to build resilience for the future. Officials have framed the effort as a race against time, with Moscow’s current campaign having decimated energy generation facilities in central, south and eastern regions, leaving those parts of Ukraine facing prolonged outages.
The ambition goes beyond the power sector. In early Feb, officials announced that Ukraine plans to move energy facilities and the defense industry underground, with Tuesday singled out as a key milestone in the rollout. Olena Shulyak, the head of a major parliamentary committee, has said the first wave of underground relocation is meant to be completed by March, a timeline that many engineers privately consider extremely tight. The logic is clear: if transformers and control rooms are buried in reinforced caverns, Russia will have to expend far more effort and precision to disable them, and even successful hits may cause less cascading damage.
Decentralisation as a survival strategy
Digging down is only half of Ukraine’s survival plan. The other half is spreading generation out, so that no single strike can knock out power to millions. Over the past four years, fossil fuel plants across Over the country have been hit repeatedly, and small, distributed facilities are emerging as one of the greatest tools for energy security. Nuclear power remains the backbone, and analysts note that While nuclear power currently provides approximately 50 percent of electricity generation and remains a cornerstone of Ukraine’s energy system, planners are wary of relying too heavily on large, centralized plants in a war zone. That is where solar, wind and battery storage come in, not as green window dressing but as tactical assets that can keep hospitals, water systems and command centers running even when the main grid is damaged.
International experts have urged immediate deployment of distributed energy resources, arguing that Ukraine has already set clear objectives in its National Energy and Climate Plan for a more decentralized system. The country’s own strategy documents, including the National Energy and, envision a rapid build out of solar photovoltaic capacity over 10 years, paired with flexible resources like pumped storage. In practice, that means rooftop panels on schools, diesel backed microgrids at water treatment plants and modular battery units that can be trucked to critical sites. My own read is that this hybrid model, with buried high voltage arteries and a mesh of local generators, could realistically cut average blackout durations by 40 percent within six months of partial implementation, even if total generation remains constrained.
Pumped storage, underground caverns and their critics
One of the most ambitious pieces of this puzzle is pumped storage, essentially giant water batteries that can soak up excess power and release it during peak demand or after an attack. Ukrainian planners have floated designs that would place key components of these facilities underground, including tunnels, turbines and control rooms, so that “it should be inaccessible to the enemy. Therefore, there are plans to build it underground.” That quote, captured in a detailed look at new hydropower projects, reflects a mindset shift: energy infrastructure is now treated like a hardened bunker, not a public utility. Partnerships with regions such as Québec have also been formalized to share expertise on large scale storage, according to Therefore project documents.
Yet Critics warn that the costs of such underground megaprojects will be considerably higher than traditional plants, and that construction timelines may stretch far beyond political promises. Some engineers question whether it is wise to sink billions into fixed assets in a war zone when mobile solutions like containerized batteries and diesel generators can be deployed faster. Others worry about sabotage risks, noting that underground facilities can become single points of failure if access tunnels or ventilation shafts are compromised. I think the most realistic path is a layered approach: use underground caverns for the most critical nodes, like grid control centers and key transformers, while relying on a swarm of smaller, more disposable assets to provide redundancy around them.
Life on two hours of power
For ordinary Ukrainians, these strategic debates are filtered through a much simpler metric, how many hours of electricity they get each day. In some cities, residents now plan their lives around two hour windows when the lights come on, charging phones, cooking meals and running washing machines in frantic bursts. One report captured a resident’s plea that “we must get through the next few days,” as Ukrainians faced bitter cold without power, with images by Valentyn Ogirenko distributed via Reuters, CNN and Newsource. Another video report describes how Ukraine is still dealing with brutal winter conditions, with blackouts, freezing apartments and repair crews working around the clock, and that even when air defenses intercept some strikes, civilians are still being killed.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
